Blackwell Reference Online

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Born to a Catholic, patriotic, and bourgeois French family, Paul Robin can be regarded as the founder of an anarchist pedagogical system. For Robin, education was a means to hasten the revolution. Having completed his studies, he went to Belgium in 1865, meeting Proudhonist radicals, and began to synthesize theories about education into a libertarian educational system. In order to break the barrier between intellectual and manual labor, he argued, children should develop all their physical and intellectual faculties as individuals (in what became known as “integral education”), and as social beings they should give their potential for labor to the society they live in. In subsequent years, propelled by his political activities as well as by financial problems and expulsion orders, he traveled between Belgium, Switzerland, France, and England, befriending Mikhail Bakunin , James Guillaume, and Peter Kropotkin . Joining the International Workingmen's Association (later known as the First International ) in 1867, he facilitated contacts between intellectuals and workers and lectured on anti-authoritarian education, but was later expelled as a Bakuninist. In 1880, he put integral education into practice in an orphanage at Cempuis, France, but was fired in 1894 on the pretext of his so-called anti-patriotism. Anarchist pedagogues like Sébastien Faure , Francisco Ferrer y Guardia, ... log in or subscribe to read full text